3. Marxism as scientific anthropology and scientific humanism

Let us now go back to the crucial problems that we were trying to
elucidate. We asked whether and in what sense one can say that Marx in his
mature works eliminated the concept of man, renounced the theory of alienation
and abandoned the humanist perspective. The obvious fact — which is not simply
an illusion — is that Marx never stopped explicitly referring to man, his
alienation and his whole development. Marxism is therefore a humanism as the
speculative interpretation maintains. But, satisfied with this obvious answer
and misrecognizing the complexity of Marx’s scientific epistemology, such an
interpretation forgets to raise the question of the real status of the
concepts which are operative beneath the words. It is not enough for the word
man or the word alienation to be used in Capital as well as in the 1844
Manuscripts for there to be automatically an identical concept, a concept of
time same status. And what defines the status of a concept is the nature of
the essence which it designates. In the 1844 Manuscripts the concept of man
refers to the idea of an abstract human essence, the subject of history, of
which social relations like economic categories are the phenomena, the
external manifestation. When it is said that ‘the individual is the social
being’, this means that, even though ‘we must avoid postulating “society”
again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual’, that the social being is no
different from the individual and that the individual is therefore ‘the
totality’.

On this crucial point the 6th Thesis on Feuerbach breaks with the
Manuscripts and, more broadly, with all previous conceptions. The social being
is conceived as quite different from the individual. It is ‘the fluid sum of
productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every
individual and generation finds in existence as something given’. Such is the
actual basis of what the philosophers represented to themselves as ‘substance’
or ‘essence’ of man: the old concept of man must therefore be radically
inverted. This does not mean at all that every concept of man must now be
rejected as illusory but rather that the abstract concept of man must not be
confused with the concept of abstract man: every scientific concept is
abstract as a concept but according to Marxist requirements it is only
scientific if it grasps the concrete essence of its object. Thus when one
reads in The German ideology, for example, that ‘the existence of men is their
actual life process’, this statement cannot be taken without misinterpretation
for the equivalence of the 1844 statement ‘the individual is the social
being’. In a way it has the opposite meaning: human being is not what it first
seems to be when one considers it in an immediate, pseudo-concrete way in the
form of the isolated individual; on the contrary, it is what must be
laboriously sought in the investigation of the objective social conditions in
which this individuality is produced. It is therefore a case not of arm
abandonment but of a scientific transfiguration of the concept of man; the
concept of human essence is to have a meaning for mature Marxism quite a new
meaning, a materialist and dialectical meaning: the essence is not abstract
but concrete, not ideal but material, not natural, but historical, inherent
not in the isolated individual but ensemble of social relations. Or further,
to transpose this conclusion into the terms of our specific problem, human
being cannot be encountered directly on the terrain of a psychology in the
usual sense of the term but on the terrain of historical materialism.

The anti-humanist interpretation isolates and distorts this conclusion. For
if Marxism as theory is no longer a humanism at all: in fact it the exact
opposite of a humanism since it is above all else the assertion that existing
man — not, it goes without saying, as a biological being but a
historical-social individuality — is not a real, autonomous substance and has
no really independent history (alienation, return to himself) either: man is
not the subject of history; what theory can know of him in each epoch is only
the result of the concrete mode of production of that epoch; the support of
social relations, the personification of economic categories and the various
aspects which this involves have no reason to coincide in the unity of a
concrete person. Despite appearances ‘man’ is therefore as little a real
concept as ‘soul’, for example — his unfolding in history is as little a real
process as the avatars of the soul — and his full development has as little
real future as the soul has of being saved. And, in this sense, it is as
unreasonable to believe in a ‘science of man’ as in a ‘science of the soul’.
Historical materialism should not therefore be regarded as the general
scientific theory of man, an integral part of Marxist philosophy, but solely
as the foundation of the science of history. In short, for the same reason and
in essence, humanism and psychology would both be a return to speculation.

All this springs from a correct idea, and certainly these analyses do not
entirely miss the truth. But what the anti-humanist interpretation does not
see, what it misses from the moment it distorts the 6th Thesis on Feuerbach,
is that although it is no longer in any degree an abstraction inherent in the
isolated individual, the human essence, coinciding with the ensemble of social
relations, is none the less an essence, which precedes the existence of each
particular individual, and of which the existence of individuals is in actual
fact the reproduction in another form, a reproduction which is necessarily
contradictory, fragmented and incomplete in class society but which the very
law of modern production will make whole in as much as the form individuality
requires it, and relative to the stage of development reached in each epoch by
classless society. This is why the Marxist science of social relations, which
started with a rupture with speculative conception of man, a rupture which
above all must not to attenuated, by no means prohibits a return, on the basis
of its result, to the scientific knowledge of human individuals and their
concrete forms of life. In fact, it is much too little to say that it does not
prohibit it: it demands it. It demands it for the crucial reason which we have
seen, relations fundamentally are no different from relations between men.
This is the key point. Of course this does not mean that social relations are
‘human relations’ in the usual ideological sense of the expression, i.e.
relations between men thought of as preceding in their essence these very
relations: this is out of the question from 1845-46 onwards. No, in the last
analysis men are produced by social relations — which does not at all make
freedom ‘disappear’, moreover, but on the contrary, makes evident what it
actually consists of and on what it is based: historical necessity. But if men
can be produced by these relations it is because, far from being unconnected
with them, these relations constitute their real life-process, and they can
only constitute their real life-process in so far as they are relations
between them, men. Among a hundred other texts, this is said in the clearest
possible way in the most famous and most studied general account which Marx
gave of historical materialism, in the Preface to the Contribution, and which
it must be remembered begins like this: ‘In the social production of their
existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent
of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in
the development of their material forces of production'.

‘An unambiguous statement: the relations of production, the basis of all
social relations, existing objectively and independently of men's’ will, are
not what speculative philosophy calls ‘human relations’, ‘inter-subjective
relations’, a reflection of their ‘consciousness’ and ‘freedom’— yet these
objective and necessary social relations are nothing else than the relations
‘connecting’ men in the social production of their existence.

To be sure, commodity fetishism, the reification of social relations, their
‘independence in relation to the agents of production’, and all the objective
illusions characteristic of capitalist society, makes these relations between
men appear in ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things'. But Marxist
analysis precisely demonstrates that it is a case of an illusion, the
mechanism of which it takes to pieces. It proves that all this ‘mysticism’
peculiar to a society in which commodity production universally predominates
vanishes if we consider other fort us of production, which makes it very clear
that, whatever the appearances social relations are always ‘social relations
between individuals. In other words, Marxism has by no means replaced the
investigation of men by the investigation of social relations; on the
contrary, it showed the fundamental unity of these two investigations. But it
has also demonstrated that the investigation of social relations in their
objective material form is necessarily primary because they are the real
foundation of all social human life. The mistake of the 1844 Manuscripts was
not to assert the unity, the circularity between human essence and social
relations — a truth the continued existence of in mature Marxism one loses
sight of if one transforms the theoretical revolution of 1845—46 into a
radical break. After all, the 1844 formulation, ‘The individual is the social
being’ occurs again word for word in the first draft of the Contribution forty
years later. What was transformed in between times — a huge transformation —
was that the real relation expressed by this unchanged wording and which in
1844 remained in a state of pre-scientific ambivalence, was completely
inverted in the materialist sense; while the human essence was regarded in
1844 as the basis and the social relations as its manifestations, while
consequently it still depended on a conception of essence which was still at
least partly metaphysical, in 1858 on the contrary, it had become clear that
everything depends on the objective conditions ‘which result neither from the
will of the individual nor from his immediate nature, but from historical
conditions and relations which already make the individual a social being
determined by society’.

Here the concept of man — the ‘human essence’ — has become a scientific,
dialectical concept. The circularity between man and social relations
continues to exist, but inverted — therefore modified in all its moments and
aspects but not abolished. By failing to recognize this major fact one misses
the significance of the whole of mature Marxism. For the return to real
history and to concrete individuals by way of the investigation of social
relations is nothing else than the aim of whole scientific enterprise in the
Marxist sense, i.e. the concrete analysis of the concrete situation with a
view to its revolutionary transformation. This is why above all one ought not
to separate arbitrarily in Capital the investigation of abstract
determinations from that of their invariable outcome, i.e. the concrete human
reality, pursued by Marx as far as the monograph stage, as in Part III of
Volume One on the production surplus-value in which, in one example among many
others, the analysis goes as far as the tragic history of Mary Anne Wa1kley,
twenty year old milliner, killed in June 1863 ‘from too long hours work’ — as
in Part VII of the same volume on the accumulation of capital, in which one
finds the general law of this accumulation, cannot understand if one forgets
that it is the law of ‘the influence of the growth of capital on the lot of
the labouring class' and the motion of which, for example, Marx follows as far
as the statistical table of workers’ overcrowding in twelve bedrooms at
Langcroft in which 74 people sleep. This is also why it ought not to be
forgotten that if it had been written as Marx conceived it and to the final
page, Marx would have achieved its theoretical point of arrival in the
struggle. This is what Engels expressly recalls in his Preface to Volume
Three: ‘the class struggle, an inevitable consequence of their existence, is
the actual consequence of the capitalist period’. And in his very important
letter to Engels of April 30 1868, in which he sets out for him the overall
plan of his work as far as the question of the rate of profit is concerned,
Marx himself finishes his outline like this: ‘We have, in conclusion, the
class struggle, into which the movement and the smash up of the whole business
resolves itself’. Furthermore, more generally, this is why neither Capital as
a whole — nor the other texts in economic theory — should be arbitrarily
separated from Marx’s historical works and political writings, since these
concrete applications of theory to living history are by no means external and
minor illustrations of historical materialism but its very truth in action.
This is why, in short, under penalty of transforming into a cliché the last
Thesis on Feuerbach, which contains the whole spirit of Marxism (‘The
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point,
however, is to change it') Marx’s and Engels’ writings as a whole should not
be arbitrarily separated from their political practice. The1844 Manuscripts
already said quite correctly: ‘In order to abolish the idea of private
property, the idea of communism is quite sufficient. It takes actual communist
action to abolish actual private property’.

And actual communist action implies the scientific understanding of
concrete reality: here we meet up with again the observations presented from
the start of the previous chapter about the fact that political struggles
themselves present fundamental problems for the psychology of personality, for
the theory of the individual. The return of theory to the problem of human
individuals, therefore, is part of what is most central in Marxism. This
return to concrete individuals is only effective theoretically and practically
at the price of the long patience required by the prerequisite analysis of the
ensemble of abstract social determinations in the absence of which the
exaltation of the concrete, of man and of practice does not make it possible
for us to escape from ideological illusions but assuredly plunges us into
them.

One can therefore see in what sense historical materialism, precisely
because it is the basis of the science of social relations, the concrete
essence of man, is in fact at the same time much more than that: it is the of
every human science — beginning with political economy, of course, but without
forgetting the psychology of personality either -- the general theory of the
scientific conception of man, which completes materialism as the general
theory of the scientific conception of nature and which is therefore an
integral part of Marxist Philosophy. Historical materialism being the ‘science
of real men and their historical development’, in Engels’ highly accurate
expression, its object coincides with what one may call social
anthropogenesis, the development of ‘the human being itself in its social
relations’; it is therefore also scientific anthropology and, more precisely,
the socio-historical part of scientific anthropology which is articulated up
with biological part. It is profoundly incorrect that historical materialism
is constituted by dispensing with the theoretical services of the concept of
man; quite on the contrary, it involves the production of a new non
speculative concept of man which at once refers to a new essence :‘ social
relations. This is why the scientific use of the concept of man normally
requires the plural: as opposed to actual men in their social relations. Man
is always an idealist mystification which thinks the human essence is to be
found directly in the abstract, isolated individual. However, the concept of
man may be used in the singular in two precise senses: on the one hand, when
it designates the ensemble of social (and with greater reason, natural)
characteristics which remain more or less common to all men through all
historical epochs as a simple abstract generality — a frequent use in Marx —
which is permissible but dangerous since the least confusion between this
abstract generality and a concrete essence involves backsliding into
speculation; on the other hand, when it designates the individual as such —
the term individual then being highly preferable to avoid any confusion with
the speculative singular. This new, scientific concept of man does Marxist
theory the most obvious services. In the first place, it is a basic concept of
historical materialism itself and as such, since neither the productive forces
(men being the principal productive force) nor the social relations (which are
always relations between men in the last analysis) can bethought without it.
It is also just as necessary in thinking the class struggle and the socialist
revolution, since the effect of social contradictions on the men who are
produced in their midst is the essential link in the historical movement as a
whole; and this is precisely why the anti-humanist interpretation of Marxism
is unable to clearly account for the internal necessity of the class struggle
and of revolution. But the new concept of man can also do other invaluable
theoretical services for Marxism and in particular this one: it can finally be
possible for the construction of a scientific theory of individuality and of
individual. The failure to recognize this last point is at the root of
unceasing attempts to constitute a theory of the individual articulated with
Marxism — a task the necessity of which cannot be denied by anyone, not even
by an adherent of theoretical anti-humanism — but by setting out from bases
quite different from those of Marx, which obviously makes their reciprocal
articulation impossible. In this respect, the clear recognition of the
scientific anthropology which historical materialism constitutes is the key to
any correct solution of the problem.

One can also see in what sense Marxism may be described as scientific
humanism: humanism as the theory of the contradictions and conditions of the
historical flowering of individuals and of the necessary advent of what Marx
calls 'the fully developed individual in communist society'. Certainly, the
two terms humanism and scientific are often considered to be incompatible. It
is a fact worthy of note that this incompatibility is indeed the common
postulate of the speculative humanist interpretation and the theoretical
anti-humanist interpretation, since in their diametrical opposition they
appear as two ways of making sense of an exclusion between humanist content
and scientific rigour which is accepted as unquestionable. For the former the
humanism of Marxism could not accommodate itself within the yoke of pure
science, since this does not reach what is fundamental in man; for the latter,
the scientificity of Marxism could not accept the relapse into humanism which
could only emerge from ideology. But the essential fact which escapes in both
cases is that by founding historical materialism and at the same time the
dialectic, Marx enables science to reach the human essence because, beyond the
ideological forms of this essence, he discovers its actual being; the old
incompatibility between an empiricist conception of science and an idealist
conception of essence therefore falls. Moreover, since the change to the
conception of real essence signifies the change to a historical conception of
this essence, Marxist anthropology is right away a science of the development
of men, individuals being engaged in the processes of reproduction of social
relations. In this sense, although it is naturally no longer a question of an
autonomous realization of the human essence conceived as an independent
substance, all history can most legitimately also be regarded as the history
of the progressive flowering of human individuals This is what Marx said in
1846 in his long letter to Annenkov: ‘the social history of men is never
anything but the history of their individual development, whether they are
conscious of it or not'. Marx never varied on this point either; all his later
work is a development of it, especially Capital, in which the whole trajectory
of evolution of the social individual, from the primitive societies
characterized by ‘the immature development of man individually’ up to
communism in which ‘the fully developed individual' will flower, is sketched
on the way.

It is true that in spite of its profound theoretical legitimacy One
hesitate to claim the name of scientific humanism for Marxism o the
particularly numerous and tenacious ideological ambiguities which the term
humanism remains linked in practice and to the speculative, indeed
revisionist, orientation often taken by interpretations of Marxism which
appeal to it. It is quite true that the label has covered and still covers the
most varied wares, from attachment to classical humanities to Feuerbach’s
speculative anthropology, from the naive faith in the value of immediate
knowledge of man by man to abstract idealization of bourgeois relations, from
the proclamation that man is the supreme being for man to the attack on
‘totalitarian socialism in the name of Christian ‘personalism’. Father
Teilhard’ famous ‘everything which evolves converges’ has more recently opened
up another career for ‘humanism’, albeit in self-defense: that of the
eclecticism of ‘philosophies of good-will’, of the confusion between the
peaceful co-existence of states with different social regime and a mystifying
co-existence of opposing ideologies, a mealy-mouthed form of the struggle of
ideas. In order to be open in all respects, it is clear that Marxism cannot
obliterate its boundaries. Marxism is not a voice, not even the bass, in the
speculative polyphony of an ecumenical humanism. This is obvious. However, it
is no less obvious that to refuse to characterize Marxist theory as scientific
humanism while retaining only its refutation of speculative humanism is also
to nourish tenacious ideological ambiguities, indeed an interpretation of
Marxism which is no less speculative and revisionist, though in quite a
different direction. Marxism is not one of the components, not even the
excipients, of a generalized structuralism which abstracts from man. It is all
the more vital not to sanction the false idea that possible deformations of
the‘ human face’ of socialism might have their natural source in the
fundamental characteristics of the doctrine. Throughout their work Marx and
Engels did not come back to the idea that men make their own history
inadvertently: this is not at all opposed to the materialist primacy of social
relations over individuals but to the abstraction of an impersonal history
which, should the occasion arise, may become something else than a theoretical
error. History is the history of men. This is why, on the whole, while there
are unquestionably reasons ideological expediency which might tend to make one
reject the characterization of Marxism as scientific humanism, there are
other less important reasons which militate in the opposite direction are
therefore no serious grounds for not adhering to what pure theoretical
considerations lead one to assert: in so far as it is the science of history
coinciding with the science of man, Marxism is scientific humanism.

Fundamentally, the term humanism is like most of the terms with the
assistance of which Marxism defined itself. We know, for example, that at one
time Marx and Engels took the term materialism in bad part and refused to
acknowledge their own philosophical position in it. This is understandable in
spite of its merits, in so far as materialism was the method, in some respects
metaphysical, of French 18th century thinkers of Feuerbach’s speculative
anthropology, and of the banal scientism of ‘itinerant vulgansers’ a la Vogt,
it was always a philosophical ideology. Marx’s and Engels’ task was not to
practice but to break with this ideology. However, when the rupture was
accomplished and a proper position was taken in relation to it, Marx and
Engels are the first to whom it becomes evident that the new conception is the
scientific transmutation of the old materialism, a higher stage in the
development of materialism and that, given every precise detail about its
fundamental originality, it is appropriate to designate it too by the term
materialism. The same goes for the term dialectic which might seem at the
outset irremediably stamped by Hegelian idealism but which was retained by
Marx basically because although his materialist dialectic breaks with Hegel’s
and re-works its content on profoundly new bases, none the less, from a more
general standpoint, it is the development of its rational kernel. Let us take
another example, the term philosophy itself. In a sense, Marxist philosophy is
no longer at all a ‘philosophy’ in the pejorative sense of the word that one
comes across especially in The German Ideology, i.e. in the sense of an
ideological view of the world, man and knowledge. On the contrary, it marks
the end of ‘philosophy’ and the advent on its terrain, profoundly transformed
by this fact, of a truly scientific standpoint in the widest sense of the
term, i.e. in the sense of a radical (materialist) critique of all
speculation, the elucidation of the concrete (dialectical) essence. To call
the basis of Marxist theory philosophy is therefore to risk fostering
unfortunate, speculatively oriented ambiguities. This is true. But not to
describe the principles of the conception of the world, man and knowledge
which constitute the basis of Marxism as philosophy is to foster other, even
more unfortunate ambiguities. Particularly of a positivist orientation,
letting it be thought that Marxism implies the re-absorption of ‘philosophy’
in ‘the’ sciences, i.e. opening the way in the name of Marxism for the return
of the worst vulgarized remnants of the worst philosophies. In fact, Marxism
rests on a scientific transmutation of the old philosophy, and in this very
precise sense all naively subjective value- judgments aside, one can and must
refer to the scientific philosophy of Marxism. Indeed, this is why all
attempts to dispense with the term philosophy, starting with Marx’s and
Engels’, or to find a substitute for it, have ended in failure, not for
terminological but for basic theoretical reasons.

In this respect, in spite of its merits, the epistemology of the break
appears like an unacceptable distortion of the materialist dialectical
knowledge. It is profoundly true that revolutions in the theoretical order do
not involve a mere change in continuity from questions to answers but the
rupture of a restructuration in depth of the old field of questions and
answers. But as Marx recalls in the 1857 Introduction, it is just true that
‘the real subject retains its autonomous existence Outside the head just as
before’, so that while they both clearly aim at the same real subject, the
change from one theoretical world to another necessarily rests on the unity of
the ‘already given concrete living whole’ of which they are different mental
representations. The later then appears like a higher state in the same
process of the ‘reproduction of the concrete by way of thought'. Nothing is
more mistaken in this matter than to fail to recognize, even at the
terminological level, what changes and what remains from one to the other.
After having emphasized Ricardo’s error, with which he broke, Marx went so far
as to write:

On the other hand ... the history of the theory certainly shows that the
concept of the value relation has always been the same — more or less clear,
hedged more or less with illusions or scientifically more or less definite.
Since the thought process itself grows out of conditions, it is itself a
natural process, thinking that really comprehends must always be the same,
and can vary only gradually, according to maturity of development, including
the development of the organ by which the thinking is done. Everything else
is drivel.

In the last analysis, is not the epistemology of the break, a one-sided
distortion of the dialectic of the qualitative leap, the outcome of an
insufficiently materialist analysis of the history of ideas which loses sight
of the unity of being behind the restructurations of consciousness?

A final example deserves reflection for anyone who might hesitate to
describe Marxism as scientific humanism — the example of the term socialism —
the parallel here being all the more if illuminating because the two concepts
are immediately related: in Marxist theory humanism is to scientific socialism
what anthropology is to historical materialism . As Engels explains in his
1890 Preface to a re-issue of the Manifesto, there could be no question of
Marx and himself entitling it The Socialist Manifesto in 1847 for at that time
there were included under the name of socialists on the one hand ‘the
adherents of the various Utopian systems’ and on the other ‘the manifold types
of social quacks’.

It is unnecessary to emphasize the fact that even today the term socialism
is less than ever free from ambiguous resonances. Everything that one can say,
rightly, against the ambiguities linked to the term humanism, one could
therefore say with all the more reason in connection with those which beset
the term socialism. In one way, Marxism has been and remains the most radical
critique of these' socialist ambiguities. It was born of the rupture with
them. And yet it could not occur to anybody to refuse to describe Marxist
political theory as socialist any more than it could occur to one to call
Marxism ‘theoretical antisocialism’. Marxism is the scientific transmutation
of utopian socialism, socialism become science. The expression ‘scientific
socialism’ is therefore by no means a play on words, a contradiction in terms;
on the contrary, it is the correct formulation of a revolution which marks
both the end of the prehistory of socialism and the beginning of its real
history. To the same extent and in the same sense, socialism is scientific
humanism.